


Nightlife

by wishwellingtons



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: (Offstage) Dubious Consent, Glasgow era, M/M, Prequel, Run-On Sentences, Swearing, the MacDonald family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-25 08:38:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2615360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishwellingtons/pseuds/wishwellingtons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Malcolm hates sunlight and daytime and fresh air and breakfast, but all of those are better than this nightlife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nightlife

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zabbers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/gifts).



> Expanded from a prompt by zabbers (nightlife). Recently found again through a notification, and I thought I'd put it up here!

Malcolm will kill Jamie.

 

He has a list of ways he’d like to do it, ways that exact and enact an apt retribution for: the shit in the living room; the takeaway boxes that crackle and concertina wherever you push open a door (wherever you can, wherever Jamie’s penitent attempts at DIY and/or his half-brothers’ butchery haven’t rendered that little act an improbable luxury); the inexplicable boot-print on the ceiling; the mould round the windows and for the caterwauled football “songs” that are an even-worse replacement for Jamie’s stolen hifi since he (Malcolm) threw it out of the window.

 

But above all, what Malcolm hates, with every atom of his existence, with every particle of angry rigidity furious on a single mattress, observing how his one framed picture shivers and bucks with the noise of the dividing wall (never again will he rent a Glasgow tenement, never again will he take in Motherwell waifs or crowbar them out of seminaries where buggery and hellfire would have been just punishment, and nothing to what Malcolm wants to exact tomorrow) is the way Jamie - amphibious wolf-cub feral child, conceived presumably in the damp gap between closing time at the Cock and Fuck-Up and early doors at some Glasgow petting zoo; raised on Mary in a bottle, and endless football played permanently downhill - drags all the drenched fucking inanity of Glasgow nightlife back into what Malcolm was insane enough to make not his own, but _their_ flat.

 

It could just be a handful of Jamie’s brothers, all nastier, taller, more ginger, less accountable versions of himself, needing to hide some gear or evade an associate or borrow (Malcolm’s) money or just bleed quietly into the sink. The worst, though, is that even though Malcolm might be down five electrical appliances in the morning and although the brothers Brendan through Caillen can’t piss accurately beyond a certain degree of blood alcohol, and though Gavin’s pure shite (worse than Jamie) when he gets to a guitar, Malcolm’d rather it was those fighty, shouty, undernourished miscreants scuffing and eating and reaffirming their sectarian and blood ties all over his living room, than the alternative. Because the alternative is just murmuring, without even a spliff, not even a smell of anything beyond sweat and an alien flush to the toilet before dawn, and only a laugh in the dark beyond the wall.

 

That’s another kind of nightlife and it’s one in which Malcolm’s sworn never to intervene. Jamie thinks it’s lying cunt evasiveness; Malcolm thinks it’s an investment in their political futures, a concept in which he’ll shortly have to interest Jamie. He abides by his vow, even when he’s sure he could fucking source the cash Jamie (sometimes) lays down by the rent book to the smell of arse and cock two nights prior; even when it makes him infinitely more frightened and infinitely more angry than anything seven demented half-brothers and a bumper back of Buckfast could inflict on a flat he's long planned to get them out of. 

 

Malcolm swore when he was fourteen and suddenly tall never to let another man lay a finger on him, and although his da’d been strictly above-the-belt, papal-sanctioned, god-fearing heterosexual red-blooded wife-and-child-beating in the best tradition of marital rite and post-industrial hopelessness, there’s something similar in the uneasy fear he feels whenever Jamie slides open his bedroom, well, ex-door to reveal an anonymous heap in the duvet, or (worse) slopes off to the laundrette with a swagger, or (worst) is suddenly on the stairs, hopping to the bathroom when Malcolm tries to do the same at night, shirtless and bitten and glazed out of his tiny imperfect mind by pills and cock and his breathtaking determination to make up for an adolescence of (frankly not even that consistent) obedience to the Catholic Church by fucking seven ways to the high holidays whichever terrifying club-dragging punk, married, straight, football, alien, socialist, cokehead, bassist, dropout, skinhead wanker caught his eye tonight. 

 

Malcolm hates sunlight and daytime and fresh air and breakfast, but all of those are better than this nightlife: this nightlife of imagining the shouts that aren’t there ;of convincing himself he just heard bedsprings (as if Jamie’s mattress still has springs in); forcing himself to be angry about the landlord and the politics and not the fact that here, close, next door in a room with the same decaying ceiling and the same mildewed carpet, some anonymous fucker has their hands all over Jamie. Someone who could come back but won’t, someone who’s been somewhere for something that Malcolm wouldn’t even know how to fucking ask for, despite being a million times cleverer than Jamie, and his trick, and any fucker he’s so far encountered in his birthtown (and a myriad he’s seen in the newspapers, or observed on a television screen). And even though Malcolm’s sure (with the most frightening fist of all) that it’s something Jamie’d be willing to give him, Malcolm lies stranded next door, with the same carpet and the same ceiling, and the same drizzling night turning to morning, as the sunshine spreads like a stain up the wall.


End file.
